Team History:

Interested in automobiles and racing, Ken Bryant and Marc Elkins dreamed of an SAE chapter here at Washington State University. They had founded the team with few other members to help in the effort. The car began to be built following their plans to make the Mini Baja Midwest Competition in '95-'96.

Initially, #68 was based on a large amount of conceptual background from the members, since not much information about race cars built by other teams was available to them. In all of their searching, they were able to locate little more than pictures of other college team's cars from the Web. The SAE rule books also gave them parameters to build around, but for the most part the car was at least 75% experimental in frame and transmission.

Overall, the competition was fun and eye opening
for all of us. Our efforts produced 49th place out of 61 teams overall. We were also the first car to flip over at the event!

From 1995 to 2002 the team contrinued to participate in the Mini Baja series, developing some innovatie systems and placing well at the competition.

In 2003 the team decided to switch to the Formula SAE series. The cars for this competition are much more complicated and proved tougher than expected to complere. We had a driveable car by the end of the 2004-2005 school year, although several things needed to be changed to comply with rules changes. The 2005-2006 school year was spent revising the design and testing the car. Our first Formula SAE competition was the 2006 Formula SAE West event in Fontana, California. Our car was extremely reliable and we were able to finish all events while even having a 5th place finish in skidpad. We ended up 36th out of 72 registered teams in our first year of competition. While this finish is not the top finish which we had all hoped for it gives us something which to improve upon.

In 2007 we again attended the Formula SAE West event. The new car, #31, was completed in one year, something that the team had never done before. This car also featured a phumatically actuated paddle shifting system, allowing the driver to shift gears with out taking their hands off the steering wheel. We were doing fairly well until the last event, endurance. With only two laps to go in the 22km event, the engine died and would not restart. This resulted in a DNF for both the endurance and fuel economy events. We finished 41 overall out of 84 registered teams. While this finish is not as high as we would have liked, we learned a lot and have a ton of ideas for next years car.

The 2008 competition car, also #31, was a complete redesign from the previous car. Some of the major changes the new car were the addition of a turbocharger and switching to a more advanced engine control computer. Another improvement was reducing the car's weight to 525 pounds, almost a 100 pound drop.